HADBO Ledger February 7, 1931

Could not sleep.

Elias does not have this problem. Elias closes his eyes and is gone, the way he does everything — efficiently, without apparent interior weather.

I came downstairs. I don’t know what I was looking for. Water, maybe. The kitchen. Something to do with my hands at an hour when there is nothing reasonable to do with them.

I turned the radio on low. Low enough that the house stayed asleep around me.

Horns came through first. Then a piano — not accompanying, not following the brass, just holding its own separate line and weaving through without surrendering it. I stood in the dark and listened to that piano hold its ground and felt something I did not have a name for.

Then a woman began to sing.

She had written it herself. I knew that before I knew anything else about her. The words fit her mouth the way words only fit when they came out of you first.

Then she laughed. One short laugh, right in the middle of her own song. Something in the lyric had gotten funny — the specific funny of a truth you wrote down and then had to say out loud in front of people and couldn’t quite keep a straight face.

I know that feeling.

I have never laughed. I have kept the straightest face.

I sat down. I did not mean to sit down. When I looked at the clock again forty minutes had passed and I was somewhere between midnight and three and the radio was still going and my chest was pointing somewhere I did not have a name for yet.

There, it said.

I don’t know where there is.

I came upstairs and got this ledger out.